Quick Specs

Editors' Review

It's a rare Windows user who has never deleted the wrong file. But the data you delete isn't really gone until you overwrite it, and even then it's sometimes possible to recover the data without expert help. Undelete 360 is a free tool that can recover deleted data from your hard drives, USB drives, floppies, and digital cameras. It can recover files that have been deleted from the Recycle Bin as well as those too large for the Recycle Bin that have been deleted directly by Windows. Of course, there are no guarantees your data can be recovered, or that it will be completely intact. But Undelete 360 proved capable of recovering accidently or recently deleted data. It includes a Wipe Files tool that can securely delete files beyond recovery.

Undelete 360's blue tones and ribbon-style toolbar make it a nice match for Office and other up-to-date suites. Two tabs access the program's tools: Recover Files and Wipe Files. To test Undelete 360, we copied a folder containing mixed data to a new directory, renamed it, deleted it, and emptied the recycle bin. Next we selected our C drive in Undelete 360 pressed Start. It took a minute or so to search our C and D drive, displaying the results in the Files Found window with a directory view in the Grouped By panel. We could view files under a variety of headings: Deleted Files, File Preview, File Properties, Hex View, and Software Log as well as by Filename, Path, and Status. The Status of each file was either Very Good or Overwritten. We selected some files and pressed Recover. A pop-up appeared and asked us, politely, to configure our recovery options, such as keeping folder structure and recovering alternate data streams. We chose an output directory and pressed Start. Undelete 360 recovered the data, but we were unable to open the JPEG images with Windows Photo Viewer, Paint, or Photoshop. File recovery tools are available to help with such issues, but that's another matter.

There are no promises when it comes to recovering data, as Undelete 360's documentation points out. But many times, it's your best option.

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Publisher's Description

From File Recovery:
Undelete 360 offers you a way to recover lost files whether they were emptied from recycle bin, lost due to Trojan infection, software or hardware failure, unexpected system shutdown or hard drive corruption. Software supports retrieval of deleted data from computers, flash drives, cameras, and any other forms of data storage. It uses quick algorithm to scan the drive and recover the maximum possible user data in almost no time.

I paid for the pro version. The download process was suspicious and the publisher was unverified, so I contacted the seller to confirm it was legitimate before I installed it. The seller did not respond to that enquiry or subsequent support requests.

Needs to be at the top of the list!
Had to download about five other programs until I found this one -

Summary

Lots of programs can recover deleted data, and lots claim to be free. All of the others that I downloaded had restrictions on the amount of data that could be recovered - between 500MB and 2GB - not much use on a 16GB card.

Purchased the software had issue with installation. Wrote to customer support. Received one email from them and never heard back.
Purchased pro version which had file size limitation and force you to purchase premium version.

Cons

Did not have chance to test it because of poor customer service.

Summary

If you want to use the software be prepare to pay more than you expect and poo customer services it at all.

Most data recovery softwares claim to be free, but they only offer a preview of the deleted files and ask you to buy the software if you want to recover the files. But with this one, I was able to recover my deleted photos from SD card for free.

If your lost data is in various folders you might want to splurge for the paid version which maintains directory structure. File date and time is not preserved in the free version, but at least for photos you can still get this from the image properties.

Summary

When I told my camera to delete all photos I expected that it would only delete the dozen photos it was displaying. Unfortunately, it also found a thousand other pictures that my wife had on the card from a different camera. Undelete 360 saved the day for free. As with any CNET download, be sure to read all the fine print and decline the added software that you do not want installed.

Free version no filtering or folder rebuilding.Requires equivalent free space on other media for recovery.

Summary

Accidentally deleted 800 GB of movies and music from a portable hard drive after turning off Recycle Bin. Never make that mistake again! Undelete 360 successfully recovered everything with minimal issues. The only files that were glitched on recovery were those that U360 noted were compromised, yet video and audio are still 99% intact even on those.

The only problems I ran into were:

1: You need the equivalent free space on other media in order to do the recovery. I have a second 1 TB portable HDD, so I had to clear that one, storing everything on my laptop's HDD, about 320 GB. Basically, it took a little shuffling, but in the end, it worked like a charm.

2: The free version doesn't support rebuilding the folder tree, so I had to find another solution to sort all my mp3 music. It's a good thing that I have all the tags and filenames well-structured!

All in all, a great program and, if you're willing to do a little legwork on your own, even the free version is quite capable.

"There is no such thing as a foolproof system. Someone will make a better fool, tomorrow." @LoneWolffe

Took 10+ minutes to scan for deleted files to recoverRequires paid version to filter or select multiple files for recoveryRequires paid version to restore to original folder structure. Otherwise it dumps all the restored files into a single folder.

Summary

"MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition" is also free, worked great and did not have these limitations.

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